Sweet As
by The Croc Shop
Summary: He wants to feed Kitty potato soup and Thüringer and krautfleckerl, pizza and chocolate cake and double-decker cheeseburgers with all the fixings. Shameless Kurtty fluff.


Disclaimer: I do not own nor do I claim to own any characters or concepts related to _X-Men: Evolution._ This is a nonprofit work of fanfiction.

Note: This story is set about mid-season one, I think, at some point before "Shadowed Past."

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**Sweet As...**

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Here is Kurt, sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, finishing up his bowl of ice cream and thinking of what else there is to do on this most lazy of lazy Sunday afternoons, and here is Kitty with something for him to do. He hears her before he smells her and he smells her before he sees her; she steps lightly, but talks loudly, and her shampoo is very strong, impossible to miss, for Kurt if no one else. He knows this scent. Essence of Sapphire. Death by Flower Bomb.

Kitty drops her grocery bags on the island in the center of the room and groans a little, her arms popping up into the air as she stretches. She has such skinny wrists, such slender arms. Her shoulders so thin.

Kurt sucks his spoon clean and says, "It is probably okay if you stop this diet now. You should eat more," he adds, as Kitty shouts, "Ugh!" and "_Kurt_!"

She phases through the island; her head pops out between the cupboards. Kurt smiles around the spoon and waggles all four of his fingers at her. Kitty scowls. She is so very pretty when she is annoyed, but then, he thinks, she is always pretty, even if she is too skinny for her own good.

"Can't you, like, sit in a chair like a normal person?"

He pops the spoon out of his mouth and drops it in the bowl, where it rings against the lip, high and sweet. 'Porting to the sink, he sets bowl and spoon aside and hoists himself onto the counter, where he can sit cross-legged and unrepentant, grinning at Kitty who is half in the island and half out.

"Ah, but where is the fun in that?" says Kurt. He gestures dismissively at the kitchen table. "That is where everyone expects you to sit. I am all about the unexpected."

"All about giving me a heart attack, maybe," says Kitty. She gives him a dirty look, lips pursing into a tight little bow, her snubbed nose wrinkling. Kurt has to look away, away to the distant wall before he does something embarrassing like confess love or fall off the counter.

Kitty backs out of the island and mutters under her breath, her high voice brought low. Kurt stares at the wall, so smooth, so boring, and listens to Kitty whispering to herself and the soft rustling of the bags as she withdraws her mystery items one by one.

It is too much for any one dashing blue-furred dude to resist. He 'ports to her side. A testament to their friendship: she does not shriek or jump away or waft a hand before her nose at the sudden burst of sulfur.

"What is this?" he says, craning over her shoulder to peek.

She hefts up a box for him to look at, a brightly colored box with a cartoony chocolate chip arm in arm with a smiling head of lettuce, which is just the sort of thing he has come to expect of food products in America. "Vegan chocolate chips," Kitty tells him. "I'm going to make cookies, but cookies _I_ can eat, so, you know, vegan. Mom and I made them like all the time. I could probably bake them in my sleep," she says, lowering her eyelashes modestly.

"They sound delicious," says Kurt, almost reverently. He ignores the dark sweep of her lashes upon her cheeks, but he will not lie, no, not even to himself: it is a struggle.

He says, "Can I help?"

Kitty snorts. "As if. If I let _you_ bake, you'd eat like all the chocolate chips."

"I do like chocolate," Kurt says sadly.

Kitty has forgiven him, he thinks, because she says, "But if you wanted, you could prep the oven. And the cookie sheets, too, that would be totally great."

"Ja, mein katzchen." He mimes removing a hat, tracing out the line of it and the sweep of a long feather. He holds it close to his chest and bows low over it. "It will be my pleasure."

"You're such a goober," Kitty says, but she smiles and mimes a curtsy, her skinny elbows sticking out at sharp angles from her hips. Ah, yes. He is forgiven.

He isn't long setting the oven to preheat and prepping the cookie sheets isn't much trickier, so he's done far in advance of Kitty, done and with nothing else to do. Kitty mixes the contents of the large bowl by hand, her wrist snapping in tight, practiced circles.

Kurt says, "I could do that," and without hesitating Kitty whips the whisk out of the bowl, flicks batter at him, and goes right back to mixing, all of this without so much as looking at him. He blinks and touches his face: batter, yes, spattered in thick drops across his cheek.

"I know what I'm doing, Kurt," she says. "Tell me when the oven's ready, okay?"

Kurt touches his batter-wet fingers to his mouth and withdraws, sucking at his thumb. Delicious indeed. He watches her work, the surety of her strokes, the flash of tongue over her lower lip. There is a spot of batter near the corner of her mouth; he isn't at all certain how it got there. Perhaps she felt the need to taste-test... He squashes that train of thought right there. All the same, he is guilty. Kurt drops his gaze from her mouth to her wrists, which are a safer target, less likely to fill him with such longing, for the sweetness of the batter streaked across her chin or the sweetness of her mouth or both. Both.

But this is not an improvement. Her wrists, so skinny! Skinny as the rest of her. He wants to feed Kitty potato soup and Thüringer and krautfleckerl, pizza and chocolate cake and double-decker cheeseburgers with all the fixings. He blames his mother, the formidable Mutti Wagner. "Eat up, eat up," his mother would say. "Look how skinny you are. Ah, do you want me to cry? Eat before the wind blows you away."

His mother baked and cooked and stewed her love and now it is all Kurt can do to stop himself from taking the whisk out of Kitty's hand and finishing the cookies so he can give them to her. They are Kitty's cookies, after all. They aren't his to give.

Kitty sets the bowl down. The oven dings. "What timing!" says Kurt.

She taps the whisk dry on the edge of the bowl. "The cookie sheets are ready, right?"

"Aye, aye." Kurt salutes.

Kitty smiles at him and the bit of batter spotting her face folds up into the crease. "Well?" she says. "Are you going to help me pour the batter or not?"

"I wouldn't wish to impose," he says demurely.

Kitty shrugs. "Fine, I'll do it myself."

"But as you insist."

Pouring the batter out is soothing, each heavy bubble swelling and flattening; after Kurt lays out two unintentionally enormous cookies, as structurally unsound as they are enticing, he gets the hang of it, mostly. Kitty hums as she works, some silly pop song KWRP-FM have on a steady rotation. Three times an hour at last count. _If I were your angel, if you were my demon._ Kurt hums the chorus deliberately off-key and Kitty wrinkles her nose at him, her lower lip pursing in a mock-pout.

"Is that not how it goes?" he says.

"I don't make fun of _your_ music," Kitty says.

"Aha," says Kurt, with a sage nod. "That is because my music is the tightest."

"As opposed to _my_ music, which is--"

"Tricky to categorize," says Kurt, squinting as if in thought, "but it's noise. Definitely noise."

"I cannot believe this," says Kitty. "Help me lift these into the oven, okay? They're like way too big for me to grab."

"So this is my punishment," Kurt says, staring mournfully down at the trays, but he lifts them up and slides them into the oven anyway. It's the least he can do. He closes the oven door and sets the timer for--

"Five minutes," Kitty says, "and then we flip them over and do another four minutes, and then they should be good."

"It is done," he announces.

Kitty phases onto the island, sitting on the edge with her legs dangling down. She pats the counter and Kurt hops up beside her, why not, close enough so their knees knock together, once on accident and again when Kitty nudges her hip against his, her knee swinging back around.

"Nice view," Kurt says.

"The best," Kitty agrees. She turns about and pops around again with the mixing bowl in her hand and a pair of spoons in the other. "Here," she says, pushing one of the spoons into his hand. "It'd be a shame if this stuff went to waste, you know? And no eggs, so you can't get sick, either, I mean unless you're allergic to cinnamon or whatever. You're not, right? Oh, God, please tell me you're not allergic."

"I'm a very big fan of cinnamon," he says, looking down into the bowl and the goodly chunk of batter left to coat the sides.

"Awesome," says Kitty. She stabs her spoon into the bowl. "Well, eat up."

Kurt turns the spoon over in his hand, then sets it down upon the counter by his thigh. "Kitty," he says and she turns to him. Very carefully, he touches his thumb to her chin. Her eyes are very blue and very near, so striking beneath her dark eyelashes, and as he strokes her chin with his thumb, her eyes widen, her eyelashes flutter, her lower lip parts from the upper. He withdraws. There is no batter on her cheek now, but batter on his finger, rolled into the thin fur; he does not show it to her, but hides it against his thigh.

Kitty touches her chin, her fingers framing the corner of her mouth.

"Thank you," Kurt says.

She blinks again, and again, and Kurt is just beginning to think perhaps it would be best for him to attempt to 'port to the coldest and darkest point in the universe when she smiles.

"You're welcome," she says.

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This story was originally posted at livejournal on 07/26/2009 for lj user **a_white_rain**, who requested Kurt and Kitty baking cookies. I wrote a great deal of Kurt/Kitty fic ages and ages ago under the penname of PallaPlease (don't go looking for anything, it isn't worth the effort), but it's been years since I last wrote anything for this particular series, much less these characters and this pairing. As silly as this sounds, it feels an awful lot like coming home after a very long trip.


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